I'm Gone Page 5
And indeed, following an analogous process, after long and vain searches during which Ferrer explored concentric circles further and further removed from Rue d’Amsterdam, he ended up finding what he’d been looking for in the person of his neighbor. Her name was Bérangère Eisenmann. Oddly enough, she really was the girl next door. Of course, let’s not forget that such proximity is not purely advantageous. There is the good and the not-so-good, a problem that we would gladly try to explore in further detail if time allowed. But we cannot develop this point for the moment, since a more pressing bit of news demands our attention. Indeed, we’ve just learned of Delahaye’s tragic demise.
10
The incidents with the dogs multiplied. Another day, for instance, between two transparent prisms of sharp ice, they came upon the body of a pachyderm that had been lying there since God knows when. Half buried, the corpse was sugared with ice, better preserved under the floe than a pharaoh in his pyramid: ice embalms just as thoroughly as it kills. Despite the guides’ outbursts, curses, and whip cracks, the dogs swooped avidly down on the mastodon, and what ensued was only the panting, viscous, repugnant crackings of busy jaws. Then, once the animals were gorged, having gnawed down the exposed portion of the beast without even letting it thaw, the humans had to wait for the end of their siesta before getting back on the road. The humans were getting a little fed up with those dogs. This would be the last day they relied on their services. They continued to advance in the perpetual light ever more obscured by clouds of mosquitoes.
Let us recall that in this place, in this season, nothing separates the days: the sun never sets. You have to look at your watch to know when it’s time to rest, to blindfold your eyes to sleep after dusting off the tent floor with a seagull’s wing. As for the mosquitoes, their larvae having reached maturity in innumerable puddles, they attack all the harder. Now it’s no longer by dozens but by hundreds per cubic yard that they lead their assaults in tight formation, entering your nose, mouth, ears, and eyes while you tread and trudge over the permafrost. On Angoutretok’s advice, contrary to the prescriptions of the medical profession embodied by Feldman, Ferrer started smoking again, even though the rediscovered taste of tobacco, in this cold, made him gag. But it was the only way to repel the diptera: in their moments of fury, it was an even better idea to smoke two or three cigarettes in a row.
On they went, over a path they could barely make out, signposted every few miles with regularly erected cairns. Simple tumuli of stones piled up by the region’s first explorers to mark their passage, the cairns had at first served as reference markers, but they could also contain objects bespeaking past activities in the area: old tools, calcified food remains, nonfunctioning weapons, and even, sometimes, printed or bone matter. Such as, once, a skull in whose eye sockets a little moss was growing.
And so they advanced, from cairn to cairn in lessening visibility, for the mosquitoes weren’t the only ones darkening the environment: fog did its work as well. Not content with disturbing the air’s transparency and thus removing objects from sight, fog could also enlarge them considerably. Unlike objects in a rearview mirror, which are always closer than they appear, sometimes in the white expanse they thought they were at arm’s length from a cairn that was still an hour away by sled.
The pachyderm incident had finally outstripped the guides’ patience. At the first station after Port Radium, at a Ski-Doo rental, they swapped all the dogs for three of the snowmobiles, to which they hitched light trailer sleds. They proceeded on these machines, which putt-putted away pathetically in the Arctic silence. Leaving numerous oil stains and greasy tracks behind them on the dusty ice, they continued to weave between the blocks, sometimes tracing long loops to skirt around the frozen barriers without ever meeting a single tree or the humblest blade of grass. It’s only that things have changed quite a bit in the region, in the last fifty million years. Back then poplars grew here, and beech trees, vines and sequoias, but that’s all finished now. Little more than yesterday, a bit to the south, you could occasionally spot some lichen, a vague briar, a weak birch, a crawling willow, a little Arctic poppy, an occasional mushroom; but these days, nothing, not the humblest vegetable as far as the eye can see.
They were still subsisting on the same individual rations, balanced, designed for this kind of enterprise. But in an attempt to improve on the standard fare, they once gathered a few angmagssaets, with an eye to a fry. After a huge block of glacier fell into the sea, a high wave had spilled those little sardine-sized fish onto the bank; more than anything they had to chase off the gulls who, threatening to dive-bomb, hovered silently above the catch. Another time, Napaseekadlak harpooned a seal. Now, it’s well known that everything is usable in a seal; it’s a little like the polar equivalent of pork: its flesh can be grilled, poached, simmered; its blood, which tastes like egg whites, makes a decent sausage; its fat provides light and heat; with its skin you can make excellent tent flaps; its bones yield needles and its tendons thread; and with its intestines you can even make lovely transparent curtains for the house. As for its soul, once the animal is dead, it rests in the tip of the harpoon. So Angoutretok prepared a dish of seal liver with canned mushrooms on the brazier, near which Napaseekadlak had laid his harpoon so the soul wouldn’t catch cold. And while they ate, Angoutretok taught Ferrer several of the 150 words for snow in Iglulik, from crusty snow to squeaky snow to fresh soft snow, hard undulating snow, fine powdery snow, wet compact snow, and snow lifted by the wind.
The farther north they went the colder it got, as was to be expected. Icicles had clustered in perpetuity on all of Ferrer’s facial hair: bangs and lashes, beard and brows, rim of the nostrils. He and his guides advanced behind their dark glasses past craters, cirques caused by meteorites, from which the locals, once upon a time, extracted iron to forge weapons. Once they spotted a second bear in the distance, alone on the ice, standing watch next to an air hole for seals. Too absorbed in his lookout, the polar bear ignored them, but just in case, Angoutretok acquainted Ferrer with the correct procedure to follow in event of an untimely encounter with a bear. Do not run away: the bear can run faster than you. Instead, try to distract him by tossing aside some colored piece of clothing. Finally, if a confrontation appears inevitable, remember as a last resort that polar bears are lefties: if you’re stuck trying to defend yourself, might as well attack the animal from its weaker side. It’ll probably do no good, but at least it’s something.
11
There would be no funeral mass for Delahaye, just a late-morning benediction in a small church near Alésia. When Ferrer arrived, a fair number of people were already there, but he didn’t recognize a single soul. He wouldn’t have guessed that Delahaye had so many relatives or friends, but perhaps these were only resigned creditors. He discreetly took his place at the back of the church, neither in the very last row nor behind a pillar, but in the second-to-last row, not too far from a pillar.
Everyone had just entered, was about to enter, was entering: to avoid meeting gazes, Ferrer stared down at his feet, but his inner peace was short-lived: pushing through the crowd against the tide, a pale woman with sunken cheeks who wore a tailored damask suit came up to introduce herself: Delahaye’s widow. Ah, said Ferrer, who hadn’t known, who wouldn’t have guessed either that the man had been married. Okay, fine, so he had been, well, gosh, so much the better for him.
Still, the widow informed him, she and Delahaye had not lived together for six years, had maintained separate residences, though in fact not too far from each other. For they had remained on good terms, called each other every three days, and each one had a key to the other’s apartment to look after the plants and the mail when the other was away. But after a week, worried about Delahaye’s silence, she had finally gone into his home to discover his lifeless body on the tiled floor of the bathroom. “That’s the whole problem with living alone,” she concluded with an interrogative look.
“Of course,” agreed Ferrer.
Then the wido
w Delahaye, who had, she said, heard a lot about him, Louis-Philippe liked you very much, imperatively suggested that Ferrer sit beside her in the front pew.
“Gladly,” he lied, rising against his will. Still, he rationalized, since this was basically the first time he’d attended such a ceremony, at least it would be a chance to see more or less how it went.
In fact, it was fairly simple. You’ve got a coffin on a trestle, placed feet forward. At the base of the coffin you’ve got a wreath of flowers in the occupant’s name. You’ve got a priest who concentrates on backstage left and an attendant at the front of stage right—ruddy corpulence of a psychiatric nurse, dissuasive expression and black suit, an aspergillum in his right hand. You’ve got people who have just sat down. And when the nearly full church falls silent, the priest intones a few prayers, followed by an homage to the dearly departed, then he invites the audience to kneel before the remains or bless them with the aspergillum, as they choose. It’s fairly quick and then it’s over. Ferrer is getting ready to watch the audience kneel when the widow pinches his arm, indicating the coffin with her chin and raising her eyebrows. As Ferrer knits his own in incomprehension, the widow raises and indicates more forcefully while pinching him tighter and giving him a shove. It seems it’s his turn to act. Ferrer stands up; the audience watches; Ferrer is mortified but he steps forward. He doesn’t quite know what to do, never having done it.
The attendant hands him the aspergillum and Ferrer takes it without being sure he’s holding it right side up, then begins to shake it haphazardly. Without meaning to trace any particular figures in the air, he nonetheless forms several circles and bars, a triangle, a St. Andrew’s cross, walking in a circle all around the coffin before the public’s astonished eyes, without knowing when or how to stop until the audience starts to murmur and, soberly but firmly, the attendant anchors him by one sleeve to repatriate him in his front-row seat. But in that instant, surprised by the attendant’s grip and still brandishing the aspergillum, Ferrer lets go of the object: it flies against the coffin, which produces a hollow thud under the shock.
Later, leaving the church with a troubled mind, Ferrer spotted the widow Delahaye in conversation with a young woman: it took him a few seconds to recognize Louise. They turned toward him once while still talking; their expressions changed the moment they noticed he was watching. Deciding to approach them, Ferrer had to ford a passage through the audience members loitering in small groups as if around a theater exit, who turned as he went by just as if they had recognized the actor from the aspergillum scene.
Before Ferrer could ask anything, Louise reiterated that she still had no news of Victoire. The widow, without having been asked either, insisted that Delahaye’s disappearance created a void that nothing could ever fill. To the point that, she stated with exaltation, it seemed unthinkable that Delahaye should not continue postmortem to make his presence felt. In the meantime, they would reconvene at the cemetery at tea time. Thus summoned, Ferrer could not beat a quiet retreat. But it’s a fact that, postmortem, as he was returning home on Rue d’Amsterdam before going out again for the burial, a large, tan, unpostmarked envelope, slipped under his door well past the mailman’s hour of passage, increased the trouble in his mind. Bearing his name and address printed in an anonymous hand, the envelope contained the coordinates of the Nechilik.
At 118° east longitude and 69° north latitude, more than sixty miles past the arctic polar circle and fewer than six hundred from the magnetic North Pole, the wreck had come to rest in Amundsen Gulf, at the northernmost limit of the Northwest Territories. The closest town was called Port Radium. Ferrer consulted his atlas.
The poles, as anyone can testify, are the most difficult region in the world to study on a map. You never quite get satisfaction. It could be one of two things: you can consider the poles as occupying the top and bottom of a classic planisphere, with the equator acting as the median horizontal base. But then it’s as if you were looking at them in profile, in vanishing perspective and always necessarily incomplete—it doesn’t really do the trick. Or else you can study them from above, as if from an airplane: such maps exist. But in that case, it’s their articulation with the continents, which you normally see head-on, so to speak, that are suddenly missing, and that’s no good either. Poles, therefore, do not make very good flat spaces. Forcing you to think in several dimensions at once, they pose multiple problems to the cartographic mind. The best thing would be to use a globe, but Ferrer has none. Still, he manages to get some idea of the place: very far, very white, very cold. That done, it’s time to head for the cemetery. Ferrer leaves his apartment and what do you think greets him? His next-door neighbor’s perfume.
Bérangère Eisenmann is a big-boned, fun-loving girl, highly perfumed, really quite fun-loving and really way too perfumed. When Ferrer finally noticed her, the deal was done within a few hours. She had come by his place for a drink, then they went out to dinner. She said, Should I leave my bag? He said, Sure, leave your bag. Then, after the first rush of excitement, Ferrer had started to get suspicious: women who are too close pose problems, and all the more so next-door neighbors. Not that they were too available, which would be fine, but that he, Ferrer, became too available to them, possibly against his will. Of course, you never get without giving; of course, you have to know what it is you want.
But most of all, the perfume issue quickly became a problem. Extatics Elixir is a terribly sour and insistent scent, which teeters dangerously on the cusp between spikenard and cesspit, which satisfies while it attacks, excites while it smothers. Every time Bérangère came over, Ferrer would have to wash thoroughly afterward—a remedy that was only moderately effective, so much had the perfume seemingly insinuated itself under his skin. So he changed the sheets and towels, threw his clothes directly into the washer, rather than in the hamper where they would have definitively contaminated all the others in short order. Try as he might to air out the apartment, the odor took hours to dissipate, and moreover it never faded away entirely. It was so powerful that all Bérangère had to do was call and, carried by the telephone wires, her scent would infest the apartment anew.
Before meeting Bérangère Eisenmann, Ferrer knew nothing about Extatics Elixir. Now he can still smell it as he creeps toward the elevator on tiptoe: the perfume seeps through the keyhole, the gaps in the doorframe, follows him into his own home. Of course he could suggest that Bérangère change brands, but he doesn’t dare. Or he could buy her another, but various arguments dissuade him, it might seem like too much of a commitment, oh for God’s sake, get me to the North Pole.
But we’re not there yet. First we have to go to the Auteuil cemetery, a small parallelepiped of a graveyard, bordered to the west by a high wall and to the north, along Rue Claude-Lorrain, by an office building. The two other sides are lined by apartment houses whose windows, looking out on the interlaced network of paths, enjoy an unimpeded view of the tombstones. These are not luxury apartments such as normally flourish in these rich neighborhoods, but rather low-income units upgraded with new windows from which, in the graveyard silence, various scraps of noise drift down like scarves: kitchen or bathroom sounds, shouts from radio game shows, fights and screaming children.
An hour before the participants arrived, fewer in number than at the Alésia church, a man appeared before the concierge of one of these buildings, via the entrance on Rue Michel-Ange. The man stood very straight, spoke with economy; his face was inexpressive and almost frozen, and he was wearing a new-looking gray suit.
“I’ve come about the studio for rent on the sixth floor,” he said. “I called on Monday to see it.”
“Oh, right,” the concierge remembered. “Baumgarten, wasn’t it?”
“Tner,” the man corrected. “Baumgartner. May I have a look? Don’t trouble yourself, I’ll just run up a moment and let you know if I like it.” The concierge handed him the keys to the studio.
The aforementioned Baumgartner entered the studio, which was fairly dark
because of its northern exposure. It was carpeted in tan and furnished sparsely with dark-colored and depressing objects, such as a brown-striped bench soiled with dubious substances and continental stains, a chipped Formica table, curtains stiff with greasy dust, and sticky dark-green drapes. But the newcomer crossed the studio without looking around and headed toward the window, which he opened only a crack, standing slightly back from it and to one side, invisible from the exterior as he was partly hidden behind one of the drapes. From there, he followed the entire burial ceremony with great attention. Then he went back down to see the concierge and told her no, it wasn’t really what he was looking for, a bit dark and too damp, and the concierge admitted that, indeed, it wouldn’t hurt to give the place a touch-up.
It was too bad, Baumgartner continued, because it was precisely this neighborhood he was interested in, but someone had told him about something else not too far away, and the concierge, not one to hold a grudge, wished him good luck as he went off to see that something else, at the top of Boulevard Exelmans. In any case, Baumgartner would never have taken the studio on Michel-Ange.